June 15, 2013

Blind: The Seeing Eye Dog That Sees Too Much in Its Owner

It's a good thing that dogs are so indiscriminately devoted. Otherwise, the Golden Retriever Seul-ki might not be so self-sacrificing for Soo-ah (Kim Ha-neul), the former police academy student to whom he's been assigned. He's adorable. She's unlikable (by human standards at least). Shortly after causing the death of her brother and losing her vision in a bizarrely comedic car accident, Soo-ah crosses paths with a serial killer (Yang Yeong-jo) who inexplicably crank-calls her for awhile as he continues his murder spree. Given her propensity for falling, bumping into random objects and pridefully disdaining help from others, Soo-ah may have delayed an attack by the killer because she seems too easy a target. But it's one of the missions of this film to challenge the audience's preconceptions of the blind as disadvantaged. You see, just because Soo-ah's a klutz doesn't mean she's forgotten her martial arts training as a cadet.

Now if only the academy did a better job at screening out candidates based on intelligence. You can kind of believe that goofy Detective Jo (Jo Hie-bong) might scrape by but it's harder to believe Soo-ah would have received even close to a passing grade in logic since her choices are so consistently poor. Even taking into account her heightened sense of smell (and the clues revealed by it), she doesn't merit serious consideration for anything but a sous chef or perhaps a job working with children -- and then only if she's supervised. I bet Gi-seob (Yo Seung Ho), the teenybopper motorcyclist who eventually adopts her as his older sister, would volunteer for those duties. After all the blood loss he experiences late in this movie, his own life choices are bound to be similarly ill-considered. Then again, improbabilities abound in Blind, so much so, that the movie's biggest surprise may be that Soo-ah doesn't get her sight back through the healing properties of dog drool.